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Firedoom

Posted 10 February 2012 - 04:53 AM

Firedoom

Four Star Zentard

Members

258 posts

Not a stupid question. The answer is that it's not as easy as 1 2 3 now that the CK is out. There are a lot of other programs involved in making the actual animations. And all the file formats involving models and animation have been updated, as well as the code. In other words, the shiney new technology of this engine needs to be investigated just as carefully as the last one was because it is more advanced and more complicated.

Ryanhabs

Posted 10 February 2012 - 08:47 AM

Ryanhabs

Seijuro Hiko

Members

951 posts

I actually follow that site and yesterday he had a write up on his front page that even though the CK has been out for 2 days now he has not been able to successfully been able to script them in to skyrim to run or trigger as their own animation. He said he would continue to work out the issue but he doesn't know where the issue is occurring atm.

Keep in mind that its a russian site and as much as google chrome helps to make things understandable it still has many problem areas in its translations and the above is what I took out of it.

strelitzia

Posted 10 February 2012 - 08:54 AM

SpyderArachnid

Posted 10 February 2012 - 09:42 AM

SpyderArachnid

Toreador

Members

2,338 posts

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=8714

Yeah checked that out as well. It's not too bad, pretty simple.

She does the animation for a few seconds, then just repeats in a loop. Kinda weird cause she crawls into the bed, then starts masturbating, then she crawls back into the bed, etc etc etc. No sound though and it is a really short animation.

fore

Posted 10 February 2012 - 04:05 PM

fore

behavior mudcrab

Contributor

649 posts

Bad news, guys. There won't be any animation mod with plenty new animations in the near future. Whatever new animation you see, it's a modification of an existing file of the game, and REPLACES that animation. For example, this "Lydia Adult Show XXX" replaces "enter_bedroll", and whenever one NPC is required to run the original enter_bedroll in the game, s/he will run this sex animation instead.

And I doubt that you will find that many animations in the game, which are there for no reason, and can be replaced without breaking the game.

The problem is that Havok (the new animation engine) anims are much more complicated than the old Gamebryo/NIF format. And although two third of their tools are publicly available, one third (Behavior) is not. And even if you "find" a version, Bethesda has not released the files necessary to feed this tool. (hkx behavior files are only a stripped version of what you would need to modify).

And defining additional idle animations is only one of probably many things of what is hidden in these behavior files.

So unless a highly intelligent programmer finds a way to hack those behavior files (and possibly implements an idle manager on top of that, so different animations mods won't be automatically incompatible with one another), there will be no new animations. At least in a way that the rest of Skyrim will work as before.

Sorry for that news. I'm hit hard myself, because I had some animation illusions myself, before learning hard reality.

DocClox

Posted 11 February 2012 - 09:07 AM

DocClox

Resident Mad Scientist

Contributor

3,110 posts

So unless a highly intelligent programmer finds a way to hack those behavior files (and possibly implements an idle manager on top of that, so different animations mods won't be automatically incompatible with one another), there will be no new animations. At least in a way that the rest of Skyrim will work as before.

Am I right in thinking that each race has its own idles?

If so we could define sex-enabled duplicates of each race, gut the normal idles and replace them with sex anims. Then if we could change races on the fly, we'd be able to play a sex scene normally by changing from NordFemale to NordFemaleSexedUp and change back at the end to restore the default anims.

It'd be a horrible hack, and it does depend on changing races from a script, which may also not be possible. Still, it's possibly a lesser problem then reverse engineering Havok.

The other thing that comes to mind is that there's a PlayGamebryoAnimation in the CK that can play legacy nif formats. So we can maybe get the desired effect by running that.

(Also, pardon me if I'm talking utter hogwash - new to the CK so I may be making invalid assumptions here).

jiggazigga

Posted 11 February 2012 - 09:09 AM

jiggazigga

Member

Members

11 posts

What about messaging Behtesda on their Blogs and so on , and telling them to help getting animations in Creation Kit implemented ! I bet if many send them a massage , they would decide to release animation tools. I think the best way is to talk with the Creation Kit Beta Tester they should have some reputation with Bethesda !

fore

Posted 11 February 2012 - 12:36 PM

fore

behavior mudcrab

Contributor

649 posts

Am I right in thinking that each race has its own idles?

No. All (non-beast) idles and behavior files are common to "characters", which encompasses all races

What about messaging Behtesda on their Blogs and so on , and telling them to help getting animations in Creation Kit implemented ! I bet if many send them a massage , they would decide to release animation tools. I think the best way is to talk with the Creation Kit Beta Tester they should have some reputation with Bethesda !

That's probably the best way to get at least a statement from Beth. I don't know if Beta Testers will or can help. Much of what I said here was repeatedly stated by one of the Beta testers in the Beth forum.

Erm. As DocClox pointed out. For the Blender and .nif based animators I'm rather hoping that this will be a back door

Just seems to be a question of reffing your actors and connecting the equivalent of "forward" to a gamebryo animation.

Just....

I didn't know this command. But it's quite obvious for what it can be used. Activators, doors, where you don't need something complicated like behaviors.

Like in Oblivion, there are 2 very different areas of animation. One very simple for movable objects (forward, backward) and a highly complicated one based on skeletons. Do you really believe that they would keep this outdated engine just to byepass their new, highly sophisticated animation engine?

labrat

Posted 11 February 2012 - 12:57 PM

fore

Posted 11 February 2012 - 01:36 PM

fore

behavior mudcrab

Contributor

649 posts

So....

ActorRef.PlayGamebryoAnimation("Special_Idle")

is a non-starter then?

What do you think should be activated this way?

In doors and activators, the animation and it's name are defined as part of the objects mesh (nif file). Actually I think the example above is wrong, as the Oblivion doors I know have the animations "open" and "close" defines. Switches have "forward" and "backward". So by calling the doorref's mesh it's apparent which animations are possible.

It's different for a character. There you have a body mesh, a skeleton, and a SEPERATE animation (in a kf file). So which animations should it use. At least it would require the name and path of a kf file. Because there is no way in the CK to specify a kf file.And all animation/file relations are defined in Havok behaviors.

velinejoseph

Posted 11 February 2012 - 03:14 PM

velinejoseph

Member

Members

136 posts

Bad news, guys. There won't be any animation mod with plenty new animations in the near future. Whatever new animation you see, it's a modification of an existing file of the game, and REPLACES that animation. For example, this "Lydia Adult Show XXX" replaces "enter_bedroll", and whenever one NPC is required to run the original enter_bedroll in the game, s/he will run this sex animation instead.

And I doubt that you will find that many animations in the game, which are there for no reason, and can be replaced without breaking the game.

The problem is that Havok (the new animation engine) anims are much more complicated than the old Gamebryo/NIF format. And although two third of their tools are publicly available, one third (Behavior) is not. And even if you "find" a version, Bethesda has not released the files necessary to feed this tool. (hkx behavior files are only a stripped version of what you would need to modify).

And defining additional idle animations is only one of probably many things of what is hidden in these behavior files.

So unless a highly intelligent programmer finds a way to hack those behavior files (and possibly implements an idle manager on top of that, so different animations mods won't be automatically incompatible with one another), there will be no new animations. At least in a way that the rest of Skyrim will work as before.

Sorry for that news. I'm hit hard myself, because I had some animation illusions myself, before learning hard reality.

that's exactly what I thought. damn it '_' I guess expert programmers are needed to do such thing as new animation

labrat

Posted 11 February 2012 - 08:05 PM

labrat

Senior Member

Members

485 posts

OK so maybe it will be impractical to use existing .nif based stuff, though I'm not entirely convinced as the .exe is full of Gamebryo stuff that must be doing something - (PlayGamebryoAnimation also functions as a replacement for Playgroup)

I can't believe that Beth would not make it straightforward (ish) to add animations as they are such a critical part of world creation.

And the examples they give for the great new functions like PlayAnimation PlaySyncedAnimation etc. use names and comments that definitely imply that these are player created animations.

I'm not at all sure about these behaviors. You know much more than me about it. As you know, if you read the behavior .hkx files they appear to be just a list of the .hkx (EDIT: or .txt) files held in the animations folders. EDIT: On a closer look they aren't all the same and there is some complicated looking stuff in there as well.

I take it that you have played with adding siblings and children to the animations via the CK - does it do absolutely nothing or does it auto-generate a link to a MY_ANIMATION.hkx in the correct directory path, and update the behavior .hkx at the same time to point at this new file. EDIT: Or does it add a reference in the behavior .hkx and expect you to provide additional information pointing to an .hkx in the form of a .txt file? (some contain that sort of info)

It seems bizarre that you would seem to be given the functionality to add animations if it just ignores you.

What exactly happened when you tried? What fell over? Perhaps that is fixable? Or is that not enough?

EDIT: Is there a Rosetta stone for the animationdata .txt files? Are they a recognised format that say Max users know but Blender users wouldn't. They remind me a bit of the FaceGen instructions. I noticed that some animations don't have an associated hkx, but do have a .txt file.

fore

Posted 12 February 2012 - 04:43 AM

fore

behavior mudcrab

Contributor

649 posts

I take it that you have played with adding siblings and children to the animations via the CK - does it do absolutely nothing or does it auto-generate a link to a MY_ANIMATION.hkx in the correct directory path, and update the behavior .hkx at the same time to point at this new file. EDIT: Or does it add a reference in the behavior .hkx and expect you to provide additional information pointing to an .hkx in the form of a .txt file? (some contain that sort of info)

No, I didn't play, because there is nothing to play with in the CK. Given that CK is just an extended Oblivion CS (which I know very well) it was easy to see that there is no connection between the CK idle animation definitions and the actual animations files. Only "Anim Events", and those cannot be extended in the CK. And a very knowledgable guy in the Beth forum (Beta tester) has given me the shocking affirmation.

Gamebryo assets in the engine? Not a surprise at all. Do you think Beth has thrown away it's game engine, which was originally based on Gamebryo? Beth has the source, and has modified that to their liking. When they announced using nif for Skyrim it was clear they would use part of the old engine. Which wasn't that bad after all. But especially animations were not state-of-the-art, that's why they replaced it with additional Havok components (Havok physics was already part of the engine)

And then the text files. I can imagine that even hkx behavior files don't have all information which Skyrim needs. Look into these files. Most of the time its about beasts, like which subset of the animation they can use. Often with a link to animation or behavior files. And it's apparent, that you need Beth's "special" tools to modify this (probably plugins for HBT, i.e. plugins to a tool which is publicly available).

One last thing. The way all that behavior stuff is set up, it's not suited for modding. For modding you need modular pieces which can be developed and used independantly. That's not given here.

(Donkey)

Posted 12 February 2012 - 05:39 AM

(Donkey)

Guests

So i guess they stripped the best part out then..

Yes i see it now, they fully stripped the ability to add new animation within editor. you can still create with right click insert sibling but it won't do you much good if you are unable to tell what it should load as animation file the hkx can do that for us. The entire structure seem to not work right.

I already warned bethesda was pretty good at stripping down there tools and release something something very buggy. Navmesh has still not been fixed, it this was there since oblivion.. This is not a new engine just modified gamebryo engine..

People where angry because the lack of tools now there is a tool but still unable to do anything. If they don't fix this up people will start returning to either fallout or oblivion.

DocClox

Posted 12 February 2012 - 06:20 AM

According to saiden on the niftools board (I think) it's already been asked and declined. I think the response came from Gstaff on the beth forums, but I didn't get that far.

[edit]

Something else that might work:

It should be farily simple to write a skse extension that can rename files. Supposing, when we want to use a sex animation we rename the file for some other idle by giving it a new suffix. Then we can move the sex animation to take that file name. Then, if we clear the cache, there's a chance the animation file will be reloaded. Run the sex animation, and then put the files back as they were and clear the cache.

We could test this. Maybe wander into a mine until the mining idle plays. Can always attack a vein with the PC if needed. Then exit mine so no one is actively using the idle, alt-tab to windows, rename the files, alt-tab back and use pcb to clear cache. The re-enter the mine and see if the animation is different.

Most likely failure will be a sharing violation because Skyrim has the file still open, closely followed by a CTD because the havok had state variables embedded that are still being referenced. Even if it does work, it'll be a terrible hack.

But it might give us a work-round until a proper solution can be found.